Illywhacker (65 page)

Every night Les Chaffey would promise to fix the motor cycle tomorrow, but when tomorrow came he would rise late, dawdle over breakfast, perhaps go into Jeparit to the rifle club, come home after lunch, and fall asleep while his wife shook her head or clicked her tongue.

“Tell him stories about your family,” she implored the prisoner, while they sat over empty cups of tea, weeded the vegetable garden, stirred the copper or pegged clothes on the line.

“I tried, missus. You heard me. He’s not interested.” Charles, in spite of his good nature, was becoming irritated with Mrs Chaffey. He thought she should say something to her husband. Instead she put the onus on him.

“Tell him something mechanical,” she said.

Charles tried to relate the story of his father’s aeroplanes but being unable to answer such simple questions as the type of engine that powered them, he soon lost his host’s attention and (unfairly, he thought) his hostess’s respect.

All Charles’s stories were like matches struck in a draught, and when he had exhausted his box and Les Chaffey’s enthusiasms remained unkindled, he despaired of ever seeing his motor cycle in one piece again.

He told Marjorie Chaffey that he didn’t mind, but this was false generosity intended to regain her affection. The truth was that he was so angry he could have burnt the shed down.

Easter came and went. The weather turned clear and cold. The wheat showed green above the yellow paddocks and whatever Les Chaffey should have been doing, he didn’t do it. He snored, or listened to his Tommy Dorsey record, or brooded over an old Melbourne telephone directory.

And Mrs Chaffey began to act as if even this was Charles’s fault. It was cold on the back veranda, but she pretended she had no extra blankets to give him. She no longer offered to wash his shirt. She spoke to him less often, and less kindly. In the afternoons she withdrew to the front veranda, darning socks or shelling peas in the winter sunlight, or squatting on her haunches to watch for something that never came. In the evenings she knitted mittens and scarves for her children in Geelong. When slugs got into the vegetable garden she spoke as if it was his fault. There was never any pudding at night. And when Charles offered his only money-a florin and two pennies—towards his keep, his wan hostess enraged him by accepting it—she dropped the coins into the pocket of her grubby pinafore where they stayed (he heard them) for weeks.

When he lay in bed at night he wore his socks and his shirt and he spread his suit across the top of the blanket. He learned to sleep on his back, very still, so that he would not crush his suit and have to borrow the iron again.

He could hear the Chaffeys talking on the other side of the wall, and he did not need to poke his hearing aid through the convenient hole in the hessian lining to understand that it was he who was the subject of their conversation.

“Fix his bike.”

Silence.

“Leslie Chaffey….”

“I heard you.”

Silence, then the movement of springs.

“Why won’t you fix it for him?”

Charles lay still and breathless.

“He should be able to fix it himself.”

“He can’t.”

“He should learn.”

“He’s a dunce,” said Marjorie Chaffey, no longer whispering. “He can’t learn.”

“For God’s sake, Marjorie, it’s
simple.”

Another silence and then, without any warning, without so much as a spring squeak, came a bellow of pain so loud that Charles could not believe it came from his friendly-faced host.

“WHY IS LIFE LIKE THIS?”

“Shush, it’s all right, shush, Leslie, shush. It’s all right.”

“WHY?”

“I’m here.”

Les Chaffey wept. His wife cooed. A mopoke cried in the scrub to the north. Charles removed his hearing aid and locked himself in, alone with the noises of his blood.

It occurred to Charles that he had fallen amongst mad people and he would be wise to escape. Still, he did not rush at it, and when he did make a move it was in exactly the opposite direction to what you’d expect, not down the drive and past the mailbox, but up the back and into the scrub. He poked around amongst the tussocked grasses and stunted trees. He found a couple of mallee fowl who opened their mound each morning to let the autumn sun warm their eggs, but he did not study them. The mallee fowl is too depressing and lifeless a bird to have any commercial value and my boy’s mind was occupied with the idea of the pet shop in Sydney.

Had he already decided it would be the Best Pet Shop in the World? Probably. It would not matter that he had seen no more of the world’s pet shops than those cramped cages in Campbell Street. He suffered from the Badgery conceit and was not concerned by what competition he would have to face. He knew only what he needed to know, which was that the Splendid Wrens he could see around him were worth five bob in Sydney. There were Golden Whistlers at half a crown. And, best of all (he could see the ticket-writing already): Blue Bonnets, 1 guinea.

Charles was feeling belligerent towards the Chaffeys and, having lost his motor cycle, did not feel inclined to ask permission to use their binding twine for nets or fencing wire for net frames. He made his nets (badly) from two sprung halves, like big netted oyster shells. He took the garden spade and did not own up when it was missed. He dug holes in the red sandy soil in the scrub, and in these holes, amidst the amputated wattle roots, he placed stolen pudding bowls of water—the only bait necessary for the job.

He was soon, on paper anyway, a rich man.

And yet I must not make my son’s motives appear solely mercenary and you must see how gently he handles the birds when he traps them, and how those big clumsy hands suddenly reveal themselves as instruments of affection. He worries excessively about their diet, their comfort, the size of their improvised chicken-wire cages, separates the meek from the aggressive, finds company for the gregarious. And when he at last succeeds in trapping a one-guinea blue bonnet he can sit happily for hours marvelling at the beauty of its feathers, the rich blue around its parrot’s beak, the yellow of its lower breast in which lovely sea you find a soft-edged island of rich blood red.

He did not feel the need to explain his growing menagerie to anyone. Marjorie Chaffey saw him using their seed wheat to feed galahs and, as was her habit when angry, said nothing. Her mood was not helped by her husband who, having passed the birds every day for a week as he walked to the dunny and back, finally noticed them, became excited and started feeding them himself.

It was then that Marjorie Chaffey began to dig the hole. Perhaps it was for compost. Perhaps it was for something else. She didn’t care. She was so angry she made it four feet deep while her thick-skinned husband squandered his intelligence and enthusiasm devising a more efficient bird-catching net. She heard his excited voice coming from the shed. She flung down the mattock and took up the crowbar. He came and showed her what he’d done. She dropped the crowbar and picked up the spade and he waited patiently for her to finish removing the loose dirt.

Then he explained the bird net, pointing out the simplicity of the spring which he had made from an old inner tube, and the trigger release which was as sensitive as a mousetrap. He did not notice that she had been crying and when she made no comment about his invention it did not seem to dampen his enthusiasm for it.

That night she cooked him curried lamb, a meal he hated. He ate the lot without commenting, talking to the silly boy about a pet shop.

“Fix up his bike,” she said, “so he can go.”

Charles heard her, but he was so frightened of her he could not look her in the eye.

“Fix it,” she said, pulling her knitting out of a brown-paper bag.

But Les Chaffey did not seem to hear, or perhaps he did hear and decided that there was no point in addressing the question until the present matter was settled. He was making some clever shipping cages. Using no more than galvanized iron and solder he was constructing a feed dispenser and a tiny water cistern that would not spill no matter how roughly the cage was handled by the railways.

He also spent a lot of time (now he was privy to Charles’s ambitions) giving advice. Half of the advice was about banks and the other half about wives. Marjorie Chaffey’s knitting needles clicked as fast as a telegraph key.

About banks he said: “You are doing the right thing, Chas, to have a pet shop. By that I mean—you are handling a product that already exists. My big mistake in life was to make a product that had not previously existed. You see, these fellows at the bank are only there for two reasons. The first is that they’ve got no imagination. The second is that the bank is a secure job. So they’ve got no guts and they’ve got no imagination. They lack every bloody thing you need to make a quid. So what you need, when you approach them, is something they can understand without thinking. You won’t have to make them imagine a pet shop, because they’ll have already seen one. You won’t have to give them drawings of cockatoos or prove to them that a cockatoo can actually fly and talk and that, if it could, people would want to pay money for the privilege of owning one. The cockatoo already exists. This puts you in the same league as importing or manufacturing under licence. They’ll lend you money whether your suit is pressed or not.”

About wives, he said: “Now you reckon you’re too young to go into marriage, and I grant you that there is not a lot of talent in Jeparit to change your mind, but you should not consider opening a business without a wife. You think you can do it, and then you realize there are books to be done, bills to be sent out, and women are particularly good at this sort of work.”

“Fix his bike.”

“If you’ve got a telephone,” said Les, blinking at his wife, combing his hair, holding the comb up against the light so he could remove the hairs properly. “If you’ve got a telephone,” (he put the comb back in his pocket) “if you’ve got a telephone….”

“I’d need a telephone.”

“You would. They’re a great aid to any business. If you have a telephone, you need someone to answer it.”

“I like a woman’s voice….” said Charles, as Mrs Chaffey rose, quite suddenly, and walked out of the room, across the passage, and into the bedroom where she threw herself on to the bed so heavily Charles could feel her misery through the soles of his boots.

“But not only that.” Les got up, went to the door, peered across the corridor, shut the door, and sat down again. “Say you’re called away, someone’s got to answer it. You can’t, because you’re not there. Now you can employ someone, of course, but then the money is going out of the family, and you won’t get the same intelligence, or diligence either.” He paused. “A guinea for a bloody parrot,” he said, and whistled. “It’s a bloody marvel.”

“Mr Chaffey, please, I’d appreciate it if you’d put my bike back together.”

“You’re a funny fellow,” said Les Chaffey who could not understand how anyone who was such a no-hoper with machinery could display such a talent when it came to a more difficult thing like birds. He would, of course, be lost without a sensible wife and in this respect the motor cycle would prove to be an important asset. Girls liked fellows with motorbikes. He began to think about the various local girls who might look kindly on his lodger, but could not, immediately, think of any. They were either too pretty (and therefore too up themselves) or too clever or too stupid. He completely forgot about the young schoolteacher who boarded with Chook Carrol out at Red Hill and might never have thought of her had he not had his attention drawn to her by chance.

Charles only went into Jeparit that day because he was frightened to be left alone with Mrs Chaffey. He did not like Jeparit very much. It was a small town where everyone stared at a strange face, and he had only gone into the general store to escape the
ordeal of the main street. He was poking around amongst the rolls of pig wire, trying to fill in time until Les Chaffey came to fetch him, totally unaware that Robert Menzies (that famous kisser of royal hands) had escaped from the same shop—he had been born there—and was now on his way to being Prime Minister of Australia.

Les Chaffey, meanwhile, was standing in the street outside and wondering if it might be worth his while to teach his guest to dance. It was then that he saw the bank manager walking at an unusually brisk pace. The bank manager had wrapped up a revolver in a handkerchief but the handkerchief was not large enough to hide the weapon from Les Chaffey who introduced himself to the man’s attention and demanded to know what he was up to.

The bank manager had only walked fifty yards from his office but he was already puffing and he was in such a state of excitement that it took all of Les’s skills to extract the story from him.

He had been contacted by the police, who had no pistols themselves, to ask him to go up to the school where Miss Emma Underhill was bailed up in the schoolyard with a large goanna on her head. The goanna was a big fellow and, being cornered by teasing children, had run up Miss Underhill (as goannas will) thinking her a tree, and now Miss Underhill was bleeding and hysterical and the goanna must be dealt with.

“And what,” asked Les Chaffey, reaching for a comb which he had left at home, “what were you going to do with a firearm in a schoolyard?”

The bank manager thought that the pupils should be sent home.

“You would evacuate the school? On account of a goanna?”

The bank manager knew that Les Chaffey was a sticky-beak and a trouble-maker, but he was also nervous of the firearm. “Do you have a better idea?”

Les Chaffey did have a better idea. He ran into the general store and pulled Charles out, holding him by the collar and leading him (still holding the collar) along the main street, past the giggling draper’s, in front of Dan Murphy’s Commercial Hotel, and up the sandy path into the schoolyard where a high-pitched scream (the goanna had just shifted position) attracted him to Miss Underhill who stood, isolated and lonely, on a bitumen square in front of the shelter shed whilst four teachers and thirty-six pupils stood in an arc and stared at her.